New program connects academia to industry with FPGAs

"Some school bake sales come with chips made of Silicon instead of chocolate." -- Ken Arnold

A new FPGA board, accompanied by learning resources and a university accredited on-line course, are among the first projects in a new program that gives engineering students paid work experience.

Among other unique features, the board's FPGA configuration memory can be programmed by simply connecting a USB flash drive. This allows much easier configuration than the standard on-board JTAG connector, eliminating the need for a PC and cable.

Below we see the Ahtlatl FPGA board on the left and an expansion / break-out card on the right. The expansion card facilitates student experiments by means of 7-segment displays, LEDs, DIP switches, and momentary push switches. The expansion card can be removed allowing the Ahtlatl FPGA board to interface with, and control, more complex systems.

The Ahtlatl FPGA board has been used by faculty and students in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering programs at San Diego State University to promote practical hands-on learning and allow students' creativity to bloom. (The Ahtlatl is an Aztec spear chucker, a tool that uses leverage to achieve greater speed and distance than can be achieved by throwing a spear alone, and the Aztec is SDSU's symbol.)

As SDSU student Aaron Penne enthusiastically says: "The FPGA board enabled me to take the leap from computer science to electrical engineering, starting the moment I saw my first blinking LED on the Ahtlatl FPGA board. Seeing my designs do something in physical space was very exciting. I learned how to program the board using both schematics and HDL, both of which will come in handy when I enter the industry. I learned about state machines, multiplexing, and various components on the board. My next project will be a software defined radio, but that will have to wait until my next DSP class. Before I learned to use FPGAs, I was limited to using a microcontroller. The FPGA board helped my fantasy of electrical engineering become a reality."

The boards have been produced in limited quantity so far, but they are available with learning resources and access to an on-line course through the htevp.com crowd-funding site and SDSU.edu. By making these products and courseware available to a larger audience, the increased build quantity will reduce the cost and allow others to benefit and support practical higher education and get something of value in the bargain.

As student Louis Nicdao says: "The projects that stood out for me were the UART, the Digital Alarm Clock, and the music player I designed. All of them required counters, registers, muxes, decoders, and finite state machines that I implemented on the FPGA board. The music player was my favorite project because I love music."

Dr. Amirhossein Alimohammad, Director of the Reconfigurable Computing Lab at San Diego State University said "We are training the next generation of digital chip designers using tools like the Ahtlatl board that was developed here at SDSU by our faculty and students." As part of the program, the university is also offering access to SDSU's popular introductory online course: "Digital Systems" an introduction to digital design using FPGAs both for SDSU students and the general public through SDSU's Open University program. Those taking the course have the option to earn university credit that can be applied toward an engineering degree and directly transferable to other CSU campuses.What is the purpose of HiTech EdVentures?Funding for higher education has been dropping and fees are increasing, even though the economic benefits are well documented: for every $1 California invests in its universities, the state benefits from increased state income taxes, reduced unemployment benefits and other sources by more than $4.50. At the same time, fresh university grads find it difficult to jump the gap between the theory required for an engineering degree and the things they must be able to do in order to hit the ground running in industry as a working engineer. Academic accreditation requirements and funding constrain universities' options, while competitive pressures in industry require that newly hired engineers become productive quickly. HR departments filter out resumes that do not show current paid job experience, and like unemployed workers, so they are never seen by hiring managers. That can leave students in a real bind if they cannot obtain one of the few paid internship positions.

HiTechEdVentures.org was created to fund programs that could not otherwise be funded and to address the related problems by giving students paid work experience solving real-world engineering problems. The program also provides a resource to industry in the form of engineering services for projects and a way to connect with potential future employees. In addition, the entrepreneurial students learn from developing crowd-funded products, such as the Ahtlatl FPGA board for fund-raising to support STEM education programs.

About the author Ken Arnold's current interests include embedded systems, wireless communication for embedded systems, FPGAs, ASICs, and toys.

In addition to his product design business at hte.com, Ken hass written a couple of books and teaches part-time at San Diego area universities, currently at SDSU.edu (San Diego State University), and formerly UCSD.edu (University of California, San Diego Extended Studies).

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Ken Arnold writes: Yes, I agree that it is a bad idea to use any tool that is a bad impedance match for the problem at hand, whether it's a chip, OS, or a computer language. So, are you volunteering to assist us with a new board with an FPGA from another vendor? ;) It's a sensitive topic and we had quite a bit of internal discussion about this choice, hence my long response below. We will be using other FPGA vendors parts when we can, but we have much still to do and very limited resources. But Money Talks. So far the ONLY contributions have been from the university, me personally, my product development business, and a little bit of cash generated from HiTechEdVentures.org's consulting and crowd-funding activities (so, not very much). And Max was kind enough to inviite us to blog on APP, also sponsored by Xilinx. Total contribution from all FPGA vendors to date = $0.00 and 0 assistance of any other kind beyond what Max has done and vendor reps aand sales people occasionally chatting with us, typically when they needed to log an "account visit" for their bosses in sales management. Xilinx has helped our programs in a very tiny way through their university program and a few samples now and then, which is vastly more help than I can say we received from all the other programmable logic vendors combined, so naturally they were first on our list. That said, one of the things I personally try to instill in all the students is a healthy sense of skepticism, which has apparently been effective. As my friend and former student Randy Hern stated so well: "Data sheets are marketing documents, NOT engineering documents." As much as we can, we try to use technology in our program that is not tied to a specific vendor, such as ARM ISA and open source material from sources like OpenCores.org. And we cover both VHDL and Verilog, but there isn't any vendor agnostic FPGA architecture, so we had to pick something. And while they may publicly claim otherwise, most semi vendors look at university and small enterprise consulting activities with the same short term "they're never going to amount to significant sales (and therefore a sales commission), so it's not worth our effort" point of view, even though some pretty big production runs, new businesses, and whole market segments have grown out of university incubator programs. A few of the semi vendors will occasionally make a big deal over a short term university program, but they often spend more on banners and promoting their efforts than they do actually helping universities. Many vendors have been very supportive of university programs in the past, but that has diminished greatly since they sense that the designs are mostly offshore. So the minimal assistance can dry up very quickly. That's also one of the reasons why we want to spin our own board solutions: Freescale dropped a microcontroller product that one of our faculty was depending on using for his course, and they never even returned his calls and emails asking where we could obtain the eval boards for the course until it was too late. He had to rewrite a massive amount of course and lab material in very little time, which is why we switched to ARM architecture for that course. Any given vendor may choose to "deprecate" a board or chip without warning, but the ARM architecture will persist for a long time. Not so for FPGAs.

While just one vendor is good for the basic's, students also need to be made aware of the pro's and con's of each vendor's technology and the full range of offerings in the FPGA world -- this way one can chose the correct part for the job -- there is nothing like having to tell management you need to add 10,000 pounds of structural strength to a product because the Xilinx FPGA takes 0.25 sec to restart, and a consultant is asking why you did not use another vendor!

DrFPGA:
Interesting! Such a competition would certainly present the students with a challenge. We'll take a closer look at that, and see what they come up with. One of the best things about the students is that they don't know the "standard and customary" ways to solve problems, so they often surprise me with the "outside the box" and totally unexpected solutions they come up with. Often when I see something they've done, I have to suppress my "that won't work" reflex, and find they have a truly unique solution. That's a big kick for me, and is right up there with seeing the light in their eyes when a difficult concept dawns on them. I learn a lot from our students, and get to have fun too!
Some of them have gone on to design new products, start new companies, and one of them even created a new product category with his class project a while back.
- Ken

Adam:
Yes, exactly! -- I hope you're correct -- that's the intent of our program. Knowledge of the theory is necessary, but not sufficient. It's easier to teach the theory alone, because that doesn't change as fast as the technology. But to be effective, engineers must be able to apply the theory and understand why their designs may work in simulation and fail in a real chip.
Besides, making things blink, click, buzz and whir is a whole lot more fun!
- Ken

Thanks for your interest. We've used other vendors, but Xilinx is more popular in industry, and we want to make sure our students have experience with the dominant suppliers as well as the secondary ones.
We have a university license for Chipscope so the students use that for their projects. Also, we don't like using the suppliers eval boards because they can drop them the moment they redirect their marketing efforts to another part without warning, leaving us holding the bag!
I'd be happy to trade experiences teaching classes, and you can email me ken.eet at hte dot com.
- Ken

Hi, It is very important that engineering students are able to get there hands on real FPGA boards enabling them to test and see their design working in the silicon. It is very important especially for the times when the FPGA design does not quite function as desired, it then allows the student to learn the important debugging skills and gain confidence in their skills. This programme should help students acheive that goal.

Hi Ken,
I'm a design engineer with a strong background in FPGA development. Last Fall, I taught a course in digital design (adjunct) and wanted to incorporate an FPGA development kit that the students could keep after the course was finished so they could continue exploring on their own. I wholeheartedly support the inclusion of FPGAs in college courses and love when students express interest in the technology. I think it's fantastic that you can engage so many students with different aspects of this project.
When evaluating Xilinx and Altera, it appeared that Chipscope was not provided with the free version of ISE while SignalTap is part of Quartus Web Edition. This was one of the primary factors that swayed me to use the Altera-based DE0-Nano. The students found SignalTap to be quite effective in helping them troubleshoot their designs. I did start with functional simulation but I wanted the students to encounter some of the differences between simulation and synthesis. Were you able to find a workaround for this?
Best regards,
Scott